Onegin then visits the Tauris [Crimea]:
land sacred unto the imagination:
there with Orestes argued Pylades;
there Mithridates stabbed himself;
12 there sang inspired Mickiéwicz
and in the midst of coastal cliffs
recalled his Lithuania.
Beauteous are you, shores of the Tauris,
when from the ship one sees you by the light
of morning Cypris, as I saw you
4 for the first time.
You showed yourselves to me in nuptial splendor.
Against a blue and limpid sky
shone the amassments of your mountains.
8 The pattern of valleys, trees, villages
was spread before me.
And there, among the small huts of the Tatars...
What ardency awoke in me!
12 With what magical yearnfulness
my flaming bosom was compressed!
But, Muse, forget the past!
Whatever feelings then lay hidden
within me — now they are no more:
they went or changed....
4 Peace unto you, turmoils of former years!
To me seemed needful at the time
deserts, the pearly rims of waves,
and the sea's rote, and piles of rocks,
8 and the ideal of “proud maid,”
and nameless pangs.
Other days, other dreams;
you have become subdued,
12 my springtime's high-flung fancies,
and unto my poetic goblet
I have admixed a lot of water.
Needful to me are other pictures:
I like a sandy hillside slope,
before a small isba two rowans,
4 a wicket gate, a broken fence,
up in the sky gray clouds,
before the thrash barn heaps of straw,
and in the shelter of dense willows
8 a pond — the franchise of young ducks.
I'm fond now of the balalaika
and of the trepak's drunken stomping
before the threshold of the tavern;
12 now my ideal is a housewife,
my wishes, peace
and “pot of shchi but big myself.”
The other day, during a rainy spell,
as I had dropped into the cattle yard —
Fie! Prosy divagations,
4 the Flemish School's variegated dross!
Was I like that when I was blooming?
Say, Fountain of Bahchisaray!
Were such the thoughts that to my mind
8 your endless purl suggested
when silently in front of you
Zaréma I imagined?...
Midst the sumptuous deserted halls
12 after the lapse of three years, in my tracks
in the same region wandering, Onegin
remembered me.
I lived then in dusty Odessa....
There for a long time skies are clear.
There, stirring, an abundant trade
4 sets up its sails.
There all exhales, diffuses Europe,
all glitters with the South, and brindles
with live variety.
8 The tongue of golden Italy
resounds along the gay street where
walks the proud Slav,
Frenchman, Spaniard, Armenian,
12 and Greek, and the heavy Moldavian,
and the son of Egyptian soil,
the retired Corsair, Moralí.
Odessa in sonorous verses
our friend Tumanski has described,
but at the time with partial eyes
4 he gazed at it.
Upon arriving, he, like a true poet,
went off to roam with his lorgnette
alone above the sea; and then
8 with an enchanting pen
he glorified the gardens of Odessa.
All right — but there, in point of fact,
is a bare steppe around;
12 in a few places recent labor
has forced young boughs on sultry days
to give compulsory shade.
But where, pray, was my rambling tale? “In dusty
Odessa,” I had said.
I might have said “in muddy
4 Odessa” — and indeed would not have lied there either.
For five-six weeks a year
Odessa, by the will of stormy Zeus,
is flooded, is stopped up,
8 is in thick mud immersed.
Some two feet deep all houses are embedded.
Only on stilts does a pedestrian
dare ford the street. Chariots and people
12 sink in, get stuck; and hitched to droshkies
the ox, horns bent, replaces
the debile steed.